Script for Wuthering Heights Video Essay
We like to believe love is beautiful and freeing. Jack’s love for Rose in Titanic sets her free from herself. It liberates her from her role in society. It strengthens her autonomy and empowers her to redefine who she wants to be. While Jack’s death is tragic, it’s necessary for her future. His love and the memory of their love is how Rose chooses to honor him, by living life to the fullest, like he always encouraged her to do.
In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy’s love stems from respect and self-awareness, emerging only when they become more secure in who they are. You can’t love someone, until you love yourself, or can you?
Wuthering Heights blurs the lines between obsession and love, where to love someone is not simply to care for them, but to belong to them. Become a pet. To be kept. In the film, the word “pet” is thrown around in reference to belonging to someone. Catherine does not only call him Heathcliff but she names him “Heathcliff”. To name something, is to define it, to make it yours, to make it respond to you. Is that why we give each other pet names? Why John, becomes “Babe”. A pet name sounds affectionate, but it also signals ownership.
The film pushes the pet metaphor even further with Isabella. While her relationship with Heathcliff is one sided, staged, and consensual, it’s degrading. The film doesn’t shy away from literally showing this poor girl on her knees, leashed, and following commands. In her head, she belongs to Heathcliff. Belonging to him to this extent strips her humanity. The same instinct that makes us melt at being called “baby” is the one that, taken to its extreme, makes someone wear a collar and call it love.
Autonomy becomes negotiable and the boundaries between self and other, begin to dissolve. Catherine and Heathcliff’s fixation dissolves identity and prioritizes possession over humanity.
So is one more romantic than the other? Is the highest form of love freedom… or belonging?
Do we mistake intensity and passion for depth? Heathcliff and Catherine’s devotion is rooted in dependence on one another. They require one another to simply exist. Their identities are fused, the emotional stability is contingent on proximity. The camera supports this claim by making the audience as close as possible to Heathcliff and Catherine’s face, distorting their identities and distorting our views. The film asks: Why should we care? Why does it matter how we treat others or how we treat ourselves? It’s intoxicating.
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When Catherine makes herself sick from no longer being able to see Heathcliff, she’s not heartbroken, she’s an amputee. She has severed a part of herself. Her heartbreak isn’t poetic, its medical. Cathy locks herself in her room, refuses to eat, and spirals into septic shock after her miscarriage is left untreated. The film shows us the bodily sacrifice of this kind of belonging: she actively chooses to starve the body that can’t be near him.
Other questions arise — Who are we without our soulmates? What happens when they are gone? Were we ever whole to begin with?
Wuthering Heights functions as both romance and a cautionary tale, asking, are you willing to surrender yourself to someone else entirely? To be claimed. In Twilight, Bella Swan is certain of 3 things in her life: Edward is a vampire, Edward wants to kill her, and she’s irrationally in love with him. Bella and Catherine’s love for their other halves is mythic and draining. It’s self destructive, but who cares?
Belonging this deeply makes separation impossible. A love that promises permanence in exchange for self. What is the real autonomy? Being set free by love or love binding so tightly, freedom no longer feels necessary?
When someone is the sun, you are the planet. When they move, you move. Their love is the gravity holding you together.
We’ve been obsessed with this kind of gravity since Shakespeare first put it on a balcony. Romeo and Juliet aren’t just star-crossed lovers — they are the original blueprint for love as a total loss of self. For them, the family name and social status aren’t just obstacles; they are parts of an identity they are desperate to shed so they can belong to each other instead. It’s the ultimate trade-off: they give up their individuality, and eventually their lives. That is THE definition of soulmates, where the only way to truly belong to one another is to stop existing as individuals… to stop existing altogether.
It’s important to note — Catherine embraces this life. Catherine, like Bella, has other options. Edgar Linton, much like Jacob Black, represents stability. They embody the peace and calm their respective women are supposed to want. They represent partners that are emotionally present, reliable, and safe. A healthier choice. Jacob is loyal and warm. Edward is all risk. Loving Edward and Heathcliff is consuming. In Cassavetes’ 2004 film, The Notebook, Lon Hammond is the healthier choice. He offers stability, respect, social acceptance, and an overall comfortable life, but Noah Calhoun is the love Allie cannot escape. When they meet again, Allie shrugs, because what else could she have chosen? It’s destiny.
But then we have Isabella. Isabella is the outsider, the cautionary tale within the cautionary tale. What happens when you want what others have. The FOMO, the despair. She isn’t in love with Heathcliff — she’s in love with the idea of him. She watches the way Catherine looks at him and responds to him. She watches the way Heathcliff moves around the room for her. She wants to be part of that gravitational pull. If she gets close enough, she could have it too. She confuses proximity for destiny. So she chooses the performance of belonging instead of the reality of it. She becomes a pet, but submission is not the same as surrender. Isabella wants the shape of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love, but she doesn’t have the soul for it. She thinks devotion is mimicry. She thinks passion can be taught or earned. But the film shows us the difference: Catherine and Heathcliff consume each other because they are made of the same. Isabella is playing dress-up in someone else’s tragedy, and she pays the price for entering a story that was never hers.
In our teenage years — every text is life-altering. Your belly burns staring at the phone. Every break up is the end of the world. Collapsing into the ache and refusing the world is the only cure. There is something undeniably visceral and intoxicating about this level of intensity. In our youth, we are at our most passionate, our most desperate; we are willing to lose ourselves because we haven’t built up the walls yet. But as we get older, we trade that fire for fixtures and suffering for stability. We prioritize healthy boundaries and autonomy until the relationship feels more like a partnership and less like a fever. Is it possible that in our search for stability, we’ve accidentally silenced the part of ourselves that wants to be swept up in something larger than life, something that feels less like a choice and more like a destiny. Maybe there’s a specific kind of magic in letting someone be your gravity — to be a little bit irrational, a little bit consumed, and a lot more alive. Wuthering Heights reminds us that while obsession is a cautionary tale, a life without that spark is just a pale, deafening room.
